Catching up on Classics (and lots more!) discussion

The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges is our April 2022 Short Story/Novella Read.

This discussion will open on April 1

Beware Short Story Discussions will have Spoilers

I really enjoyed this short story! I'd never heard of it, so I'm glad that it was chosen. It will be fun to discuss.

I read this short story. I understand it's part of a larger group of stories that are loosely tied together. I gave the story 3*. Perhaps if I read the entire collection I would give it a higher rating.

I liked the concept. The idea of a Library shows up over and over in Science Fiction - I immediately thought of the Library where Dr. Who meets Dr. Song.

His ideas were interesting about all the books possible being written and there being only the perfect number of characters that correspond to something in Nature - Reality? so to speak. This was much like Plato and the idea of things on Earth being shadows of perfect forms in the heavens. Of course, all that section could be blown up by proposing that, nope you could always add in another letter. Then there was a perfect book corresponding to each person born - predestination? I am not sure why the librarians must have a room to live in that was so small they had to sleep standing up. Poor guys - unless it symbolized that we all sleepwalk through our lives? Or maybe, being a real-life librarian, he was just complaining about cramped work areas.

Borges was in Switzerland during WWII. I am sure his fast-paced recap of human history - that took place in the library - was in reaction to all the turmoil of Europe at the time. I just wish he had been more explicit in what he was trying to say. Some stories are so vague that they open themselves up to thousands of interpretations. Personally I find thousands of interpretations tiring not fun, although I know some people love it.

It took me sometime to picture the library. I couldn't fully understand the story but could figure some parts. Seems like hexagon is a popularly preferred geometry.

Lynn, that's interesting about different Borges stories being related. I originally read this one as part of Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings, and I didn't notice something like that, but maybe it's true in the original grouping he published together?

I know whenever I read the selected or collected poems by an author, I always have that problem. Very often, the original chapbooks that poets publish have a smaller set of poems all written in a similar timeframe that do relate and reflect on each other, and even the ordering can be significant. Reading those poems later divorced from that and jumbled together with poems from a lot of their other random chapbooks often loses something. Sometimes the context that's lost even makes the poems themselves hard to understand.

It never occurred to me that short stories could have a similar issue, but it does make sense that it might happen in some cases. Now I'm really curious as to what other short stories this one was originally published with and in what order!

I used Wikipedia...I know not a perfect source... but it says
Quote
"Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (/ˈbɔːrhɛs/;[2] Spanish: [ˈboɾxes] (audio speaker iconlisten); 24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and El Aleph (The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, philosophers, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, and mythology.[3] Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and influenced the magic realist movement in 20th century Latin American literature.[4] His late poems converse with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil."
End quote

My response:
"The Library of Babel" is found in two collections published in the 1940s The Garden of Forking Paths published in 1941 and it was then republished in Fictions in 1944. I was just wondering if reading more of selections with the interconnected themes would help me narrow down his message. Like I said before, the only drawback I saw to the story was its vagueness.

Oh one more thought... when you look at the publication history of Science Fiction you see many short stories magazines in United States during the 1930s, 1940s, and waning in the 1950s. In the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s you then see many Science Fiction authors taking their previous stories to devise what were called "fix-up" novels - for instance City by Clifford D. Simak. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury is another novel? short story collection? example.

Anyway, the idea of short stories put together in a loose narrative was very prevalent in fantasy/science fiction at the time Borges wrote this.

in manu ways, brilliant. Borges often has great turns of phrase, and the sheer dazzling breath of the concepts he creates is often breathtaking.

but to be honest, i hate his writing. Christ is it boring, christ is is meandering. I find his stories appalingly frustrating, mostly because they're not stories. They're more meandering little thought experiments that often go nowhere. I understand its about *something*, but what I haven't the foggiest. Are the different librarians different philosophical approaches to truth? Is the library truth? or God? Or both? I mean...in the end, I cannot be bothered. Such indescribable, mystifying obscurantianism, laced with a kind of pseduo-profound, airy-fairy tone of blithe philosophical music, just drives me crazy. there's such a richness to the ideas involved and it's never once matched up with the actual content of the stories or the themes behind.

Like, I want a novel set in this place! Or even a short story. It's a fascinating idea. Come on! Let's explore it, all it's nooks and crannies and ideas. Let's see the conflicts and the different religious sects, let's see the doomed attempt to find the messiah, the librarian who has found the One book. That's really interesting. But the story just floats off like a fart cloud and...oh...okay then, nevermind. (sigh).

Andrew wrote: "in manu ways, brilliant. Borges often has great turns of phrase, and the sheer dazzling breath of the concepts he creates is often breathtaking.

but to be honest, i hate his writing. Christ is it ..."

LOL I said vague. You said airy, fairy fart cloud. You definitely win!!!! Great phrasing. still laughing.

Lynn - I totally thought of The Library on Doctor Who as well! Let's hope the Vashta Nerada spares the Library of Babel or those poor librarians are in for a very bad time. ;p

I actually think I liked this story for the reasons you didn't, Andrew. I like that Borges doesn't tell you exactly what the library is and leaves it open to the reader's interpretation. I also liked that it was very short. I wouldn't want to read any long work written in that style, but as a short story, I found it highly enjoyable and thought-provoking.

That said, I also don't feel the urge to rush out and read anything else by Borges.

Borges has a special place on my shelves. I like trying to follow his thoughts in his fiction works but he generally leaves me in the dust way back there somewhere. It's ok when he does that, but not when Eco does it. Anyway, Library of Babel. I've read it over several times and best I can do with it is to break it into sections, paragraphs even better, and look at them as stand alone nearly. Sometimes I get the vibes of trying to track down a reference for a paper that is way back in the stacks somewhere. Old fashioned paper libraries, I mean.

Just finished my re-read. Borges' stories are always very cerebral. The idea or mindgame at the center of many of these stories is more important than traditional things like emotional engagement or characters.

The mindgame at the center of this particular story has to do with the infinite combinations of alphabetical letters and symbols.

Each book has 410 pages x 40 lines per page x 80 symbols per line = 1,312,000 symbols/book. If the alphabet has only 25 symbols in it, to have a separate book with every possible combination of letters, you would need to have 1,312,000 taken to the 25th power books! But if you had this insane number of books, that would represent every possible book that anyone could ever write. So somewhere in that 8,878,628,324,041,671,119,727,680,877,641,900,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 books in this fictional library would exist the first portion of the Bible, the first portion of every one of Shakespeare's plays, every book of scientific, religious, and artistic invention but all of them generated by purely random accident! Unfortunately, with that many books, there would be no hope of finding anything useful. You'd be more likely to win countless lotteries in a row than you would to find that one randomly generated King James Bible in such a gigantic number of random books, even searching an entire lifetime!

It's pretty wacky, and it does boggle my mind. The idea that all human knowledge could exist and yet be completely out of any practical reach.

But what does all of this mean beyond the mindgame? I'm not sure. There's some fairly deep considerations of human behavior here in the story though. These are a few random thoughts that occurred to me:

1.

If people know that solutions already exist somewhere out there, what does that do to their own motivation to their own sense of invention or creativity?

"The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms. I know of districts in which the young men prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter."

It reminds me of the part in Foundation where the decadent representative of the empire laughs upon the idea of conducting actual archeological digs, since he feels all the knowledge has already been gathered in books. Science without experiment or yearning for advancement stultifies.

Of course, nowadays, I'd say the bigger danger is that people no longer have the ability to believe in any basic facts rather than the problem of taking too many things for granted. But still, it's a persistent human danger, to lose that yearning to engage directly and to lose curiosity about the world.

2.

Another thought I had is about the arbitrariness of language. By mutual consent, we agree socially on the meaning of different sounds and we agree on what they mean. Someone long ago decided "house" meant a house, and we all agree that's what it means, but going back to the first languages of the first people, maybe the word "giraffe" could have been assigned to that meaning, or any word really. I remember reading something along those lines in C.G. Jung's Dreams way back when I was in college and it blew my mind. I was talking to a professor of mine, and he said, oh yeah, that's just semiotics. Whatever. I still think it's pretty mindblowing. Communication is pretty much a miracle if you think about it deeply.

3.

One last thing that struck me: I love the part where he yearns for some justification of the library. By his own admission, the library itself is just a big random construction, like something spewed out by a supercomputer combining math sets. But he still yearns for it to have some kind of meaning.

"I pray to the unknown gods that a man--just one, even though it were thousands of years ago!--may have examined and read it . . . Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified."

I don't know anything about Borges' religious beliefs or lack thereof, but this feels a little to me like a crying out of someone without faith for there to be at least some kind of meaning. If the world wasn't created by any divine being and just blinked into existence out of some random happenstance, the world would be like one of these books, just a randomly generated coincidence. And some people do believe that in a sense--within the universe, each planet has the capacity for life, and the arrangement of factors that happen to exist on a planet (the elements, the proximity to a sun, etc) sometimes cause life to form. In that world view, the universe is a lot like this giant expansion of books. But for Borges, even in knowledge of that randomness, there's still a deep human yearning for some meaning to justify it.

This one part was the only thing that affected me emotionally in the "story." Those lines moved me; the speaker's desperation for meaning and yet his inability to really believe in that meaning feels almost unbearably sad.

I remember reading this story a few years ago as part of the collection Ficciones and saying "wow, I can't wait to someday be smarter then come back and read this again!"

I'm still waiting.

I loved reading your thoughts, Greg! I was struck by that final line you mentioned, as well. Just hoping, beyond hope, that there is a purpose. That somehow it will all come together in the end.

In my district we've been taking a professional development course, called LETRS, on reading and how children learn to read. They've given us a lot of research on how the brain works in learning to speak, read, and write. They said that speaking comes somewhat more naturally because it's been around for so many tens of thousands of years, those pathways in our brain are basically genetically imprinted, but reading and writing have been around for a lot less time and haven't become as "natural."

Because of this course, I've thought a lot about the miracle of speaking, reading, and writing because it's crazy complicated what your brain is doing. It's amazing.

Natalie wrote: "I loved reading your thoughts, Greg! I was struck by that final line you mentioned, as well. Just hoping, beyond hope, that there is a purpose. That somehow it will all come together in the end. ..."

Thanks Natalie! :)

And those development courses sound fascinating! I completely agree that the whole process of communication is amazing.

Come to think of it, the very title "Library of Babel" is kind of suggestive too. Isn't the tower of Babel the story from the Bible about how the people became too arrogant and constructed their tower too high, and God made them all speak different languages such that they were no longer able to understand each other? If so, it's not too big a stretch to think Borges had the difficulties of language and communication in mind when he wrote it.

Ah…good point! I hadn’t made that connection.

Greg, I absolutely enjoyed reading your take on it. I too loved that line where he asks for the universe to be justified and had noticed the implication in the title too. I hadn't however made the connection about how it could be a cry from a person struggling with their religious faith. But now that you say it, I can't unsee it.

There is only one other Borges story I have read: The Gospel According to Mark (or rather listened to it on The New Yorker Fiction Podcast). This one has more narrative than The Library of Babel. In this one too, there is a critique of blind faith and how religion can turn against you.

Anjali wrote: "It took me sometime to picture the library. I couldn't fully understand the story but could figure some parts. Seems like hexagon is a popularly preferred geometry."

I had the same issue. I couldn't picture the library and that made it harder to understand the story. I do appreciate this story on a more literary level, and I guess it will grow on me after a couple of rereads. But as many of you pointed, the abstractness was a little tiring.

Sneha wrote: "Greg, I absolutely enjoyed reading your take on it. I too loved that line where he asks for the universe to be justified and had noticed the implication in the title too. I hadn't however made the ..."

Thanks Sneha! :)

I'll check out the New Yorker Fiction Podcast and look for The Gospel According to Mark. It sounds interesting! Thanks for pointing it out!

I looked in the two books by Borges that I have at home (Ficciones and Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings), but neither seems to contain that story unfortunately. They do have another story with an intriguing title, Three Versions of Judas, but it's been so long since I've read these books that I don't remember anything about it.

The The Gospel According to Mark is also here to read free:

http://anagrammatically.com/2008/03/0...

Klowey wrote: "The The Gospel According to Mark is also here to read free:

http://anagrammatically.com/2008/03/0..."

Thanks Klowey!

Thanks Klowey. Now I feel like I have a hint of how to understand Jorges Luis Borges. . . . .and I may be approaching an understanding of the library and librarian in The Name of the Rose . . . .but that is outside topic.

Cynda wrote: "Thanks Klowey. Now I feel like I have a hint of how to understand Jorges Luis Borges. . . . .and I may be approaching an understanding of the library and librarian in [book:The Name of the Rose|119..."

Very much.
I've seen the movie but I need to read it someday.

The movie. . . .Now that is an idea. . . .

For now I will read and ponder just a bit on some of this article. The ice crystal in the video inset might help me to visualize the library sufficently to get through the story.

https://www.mastermindcontent.co.uk/e...

Okay I think I got my two secondary works that I will use from here. This is like reading Aristotle. One can get caught up in too much. . . .Looking forward to hearing what others think. . . .Off to read. . . .

Cynda wrote: "The movie. . . .Now that is an idea. . . .

For now I will read and ponder just a bit on some of this article. The ice crystal in the video inset might help me to visualize the library sufficiently..."

Looks like a fascinating article. Will definitely read.

Borges is my favorite author, but I happen to prefer and love abstraction more than story/character, so it makes sense. I hope to say more about him and The Library of Babel, but for now, my very quick comments are:

from my review:
"Filled with infinite meanings and references on many subjects that Borges revisits time and again in his stories: recursion, reality, time, identity, authorship, and esoteric symbolism among them.

For me this story begs multiple readings. I think this is my fifth."

And, I highly recommend reading the wikipedia article on the book:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lib...

I don't think Borges is someone you can read once and move on. I certainly did not feel I understood his stories after a one-time reading, but I was very drawn to them.

I think as you read more of his work, you can start to see recurring themes and become familiar with his writing style, which often references both real historical people and those who are complete fiction, such that you don't always know what is true and what is made up. It's part of how he plays with the idea of identity, another very common theme.

One caveat, his early work (A Universal History of Iniquity 1935) is fairly different from everything that comes later, I did not love AUHOI very much. But the rest, yes. :-)

I would also recommend The Book of Sand which is a shorter story, but has many overlapping ideas of The Library of Babel. The Book of Sand is one of my favorite Borges and I think not as challenging as The Library of Babel.

Lynn, thank you for pointing out that the concept of a Library--I am noting the uppercase L--is a recurrent theme in science fiction.

Occassionally I have read a science fiction book--in fact rarely--so I have little concept of science fiction. I have become curious this year and plan to read 10 selections which I will be listing in my personal challenges thread here. So I am curious about the concept of libraries in science fiction.

In case others are also interested:
https://seattle.bibliocommons.com/lis...

Greg wrote: "... Each book has 410 pages x 40 lines per page x 80 symbols per line = 1,312,000 symbols/book .... to have 1,312,000 taken to the 25th power books! ... 8,878,628,324,041,671,119,727,680,877,641,900,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 books in this fictional library"

Actually, that is a huge under estimation. If there where only two letters in each book, the first letter had 25 options and the second 25 = 25*25 = 25^2. The total number of possible books is 25 taken to the 1,312,000th power. A Seriously Large number. It is approximately 1.9560 × 10^1834097. I am not going to write it in full,.... because,... well, imagine I had a book of 410 pages x 40 lines per page x 80 symbols per line = 1,312,000 digits < 1,834,097 digits. So that book would not hold all the digits written out.

J_BlueFlower wrote: "Greg wrote: "... Each book has 410 pages x 40 lines per page x 80 symbols per line = 1,312,000 symbols/book .... to have 1,312,000 taken to the 25th power books! ... 8,878,628,324,041,671,119,727,6..."

Ah, you're right J_BlueFlower! I had it backward. It's 25 to the 1,312,000th power rather than 1,312,000 to the 25th power. Either way it's really, really huge!! But even more huge than I said! :D

If all books exists how can any book have meaning? Borges even seem to hint that the nonsense books make sense in another languages. Even if we only look that books in one fixed language (English), when ever there is a book, there will be an anti-book stating the exact opposite.

Lynn wrote: "LOL I said vague. You said airy, fairy fart cloud. You definitely win!!!! Great phrasing. still laughing."

You got me too

Lynn wrote: "... "The Library of Babel" is found in two collections published in the 1940s The Garden of Forking Paths published in 1941 and it was then republished in Fictions in 1944. ” ....”

That was a brain massage. So, the stories are tied together? But occurs in different collections? Does that mean that this story take different meanings depending on what collection it is in?! Oh, no. Just what we need....

I hope we can read more Borges. I have read a collection some years ago, but it is much better to read one story at a time and have a good discussion like this excellent and funny one. Thank you all!

I also heard The Gospel According to Mark as a the New Yorker Fiction Podcast. There are a few more Borges stories:

https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/fic...
Mohsin Hamid joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “The Book of Sand,” by Jorge Luis Borges, from a 1976 issue of the magazine.

https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/fic...
Orhan Pamuk joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “Ibn Hakkan Al-Bokhari, Dead in his Labyrinth,” by Jorge Luis Borges, from a 1970 issue of the magazine.

https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/fic...
Hisham Matar reads "Shakespeare's Memory," by Jorge Luis Borges

J_BlueFlower wrote: "If all books exists how can any book have meaning? Borges even seem to hint that the nonsense books make sense in another languages. Even if we only look that books in one fixed language (English),..."

Very true J_BlueFlower, or close anyway in that there would be no way for people to know whether any particular book had meaning. The actual books with meaning would be out there (scientific books, literary works, works of cultural importance), but there would be no way to know whether any particular book was one of those or a deformed doppleganger.

That's one of the interesting philosophical questions.

What effect does it have on people to know that the solutions already exist out there somewhere, even if they aren't accessible? And just knowing they're out there, is it human nature to search for those rather than inventing things independently, even though that search is completely impractical?

It's interesting that the library has become a sort of religion. It's a belief or faith not based upon reason and practicality but upon the knowledge that those golden books are out there to be gotten . . . somewhere.

For me, this is the torment of the dreamscape:

But the certainty that everything has been already written nullifies or makes phantoms of us all.

Here is my review:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Cynda wrote: "For me, this is the torment of the dreamscape:
But the certainty that everything has been already written nullifies or makes phantoms of us all."

Exactly Cynda!

J_BlueFlower wrote: "I hope we can read more Borges. I have read a collection some years ago, but it is much better to read one story at a time and have a good discussion like this excellent and funny one. Thank you al..."

I would read anything by Borges in a heartbeat. My favorite stories are The Immortal, The Book of Sand, Emma Zunz, and The House of Asterion.

I also love Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, The Lottery in Babylon, Shakespeare's Memory, The Garden of Forking Paths, The Zahir, The Circular Ruins, and The Aleph.

I think many or most are available for free on the Internet or for a small price on Kindle, etc. All are in Labyrinths except The Aleph and The Book of Sand. The Book of Sand, which is only 11 minutes long, is on youtube with a fabulous narration. If you want to listen, search for:
"Creepy Classic: The Book of Sand by Jorge Luis Borges"
The channel is: Ell Emm

Themes in these are: identity, authorship, fact and fiction/fantasy, (unreliable narrator, historical vs. fictional figures), time and non-linearity, infinity, mysticism, and probability.

I enjoyed this. I had read A Personal Anthology by Borges last year and so was prepared for his style. Yes, his „stories“ are more like essays, or thought experiments, but occasionally they have plot and character elements. But here it would seem that we‘re dealing with an allegory about the universe. Permutations of random characters generating not only every possible book, but also every thing, including people. (Written before DNA and it’s code was discovered, but quite prescient about that! … though Borges implies more than just DNA would encode). Like the Asimov short story a few months ago, this one is an interesting thought experiment.

Schmaehgol (Joe) wrote: "I enjoyed this. I had read A Personal Anthology by Borges last year and so was prepared for his style. Yes, his „stories“ are more like essays, or thought experiments, but occasionally they have pl..."

I really enjoyed your perspective on Borges and The Library of Babel. And I had never heard of A Personal Anthology, and now am excited to read it. It's interesting that it was published in 1961, which was before he wrote many of his best stories.

Greg wrote: "The actual books with meaning would be out there .... but there would be no way to know whether any particular book was one of those or a deformed doppleganger. ..."

Say I am looking for a book explaining How Nature Works. I would find trillion and trillions of book with something like

“the divergence of the electric field is the volume charge density divided by the relative permittivity“

“the divergence of the electric field is the volume charge density divided by the vacuum permittivity and the relative permittivity “

“the divergence of the vacuum permittivity is the volume charge density divided by the electric field and the relative permittivity “

“the volume charge density is the divergence of the electric field divided by the vacuum permittivity and the relative permittivity“

and of course yet trillion and trillions of book with a “not” inserted various places.

How would I know which one was the “actual book with meaning”? I would have to test it against the real world doing scientific experiments. All possible and impossible physical laws would be in books in all variations. Together with books “it is all magic, there are no laws”. Wouldn’t it be easier to skip the step of looking in the books completely? They do not have meaning.

Or am I confusing “have meaning” with “carry information”?

J_BlueFlower wrote: "Greg wrote: "The actual books with meaning would be out there .... but there would be no way to know whether any particular book was one of those or a deformed doppleganger. ..."

Say I am looking ..."

I really like this take on the story. If I have understood what you are saying correctly, I think there is a difference between "having meaning" and "being useful in answering the universal question." So, what I think is that each work could hold meaning in itself because each book is saying something about the universe. True, there might be other books that negate it, but this one is definitely saying something, as is that one.

However, I see how in the larger sense, none of these books add to our understanding of the origins of the universe, how nature works, or what the meaning of life even is.

The way I see it, the story kind of imitates real life. We too have books claiming to know exactly where we came from, how the earth was formed, why we are here, what is the purpose of life. We also know that they are just speculations because they often conflict in their theories. And in all, nobody really knows what the correct answer is. But each book has meaning.

And that's where the "cults" or groups that Borges talks about comes into discussion, in my opinion. Much like in real life, some books have more meaning than others for some groups of people. Or some books help us develop our own purpose and ignore the existential dread we inevitably experience.

Sneha wrote: "The way I see it, the story kind of imitates real life. We too have books claiming to know exactly where we came from, how the earth was formed, why we are here, what is the purpose of life. We also know that they are just speculations because they often conflict in their theories. And in all, nobody really knows what the correct answer is. But each book has meaning."

I like that Sneha! - that isn't exactly the way I was seeing it originally, but it's a fascinating and fresh way to look at the story! And it's certainly possible that all these semi-duplicates have a metaphorical meaning as you say. For sure, there can be no way to know which one holds the correct answer.

J_BlueFlower wrote: "How would I know which one was the “actual book with meaning”? I would have to test it against the real world doing scientific experiments. All possible and impossible physical laws would be in books in all variations. Together with books “it is all magic, there are no laws”. Wouldn’t it be easier to skip the step of looking in the books completely? They do not have meaning."

Absolutely, J_BlueFlower! If you were thinking practically, you would not look at these books at all!

But I guess maybe there is a flaw in human nature being exposed here. Even though the books are of no practical use because there is no way to find the "correct" books, just knowing that the real books are somewhere out there makes people obssess about them. They become a distraction and de-energize people from experimenting and inventing. They know they can invent nothing new because the real answers are somewhere in the library, even though they have no possible way to find them.

It's a completely silly thing to do, but the people do it anyway. And I think that's one reason the library becomes a kind of religion. The library only holds any power for them because they believe in it on faith.

Sneha wrote: And in all, nobody really knows what the correct answer is. But each book has meaning. ....."

There are ways of testing for correctness. You can test with experiments. Maybe a math example is simpler:

Among the trillion and trillions of math books I see

”two and two is three”

”two and two is four”

”two and two is five”

”two and two is adfsfasdhsdfh”

One of those four is correct, and you know which one. Is it worth finding that book?

Let us say I somehow pick the one with ”two and two is four” as the most trustworthy.

That one comes in several trillion variations for instance:
”two and two is four. and the dfhjksd of shkjgw is fhgdff” that the first part was trustable does not say anything about what follows in any of the variations.

PS. I hope the concept of "trillion and trillions of math books" did not induce any nightmares ;-)

This is a fantastic conversation! I've enjoyed reading everyone's thoughts.

I loved what you said here, Sneha:

The way I see it, the story kind of imitates real life. We too have books claiming to know exactly where we came from, how the earth was formed, why we are here, what is the purpose of life. We also know that they are just speculations because they often conflict in their theories. And in all, nobody really knows what the correct answer is. But each book has meaning.

It's fascinating how many different views you can take on this story. Greg, you said that

What effect does it have on people to know that the solutions already exist out there somewhere, even if they aren't accessible? And just knowing they're out there, is it human nature to search for those rather than inventing things independently, even though that search is completely impractical?

When I was reading I was thinking of those intertwined, when the librarians were "searching" for answers that was representative of people "inventing" and striving for solutions. For instance, scientists trying to find preventative medicine for something like cancer. I think we all like to believe there is an answer, but it hasn't been discovered yet.

Based on this conversation, I'm starting to agree that it would be fun to read more Borges with the group.

J_BlueFlower wrote: "That one comes in several trillion variations for instance:
”two and two is four. and the dfhjksd of shkjgw is fhgdff” that the first part was trustable does not say anything about what follows in any of the variations"

I somehow agree with this as well. Since mathematical patterns have been proven to exist in nature, there are certain patterns that are more trustworthy (or correct) than others, I suppose. What I have noticed though is that we may find out basic (correct) patterns, but they don't always help us in understanding the larger questions. I guess it is because at some point, when we are unable to experiment to find the right answers, we are forced to make leaps of faith/assumptions.

For instance, we may believe that "two and two is four" is the most trustworthy, but does this pattern have any influence in the creation of the universe? That will need experimentation tools and time far beyond our current capabilities. Again, we return to not really knowing the right answer.

Also, I assumed Borges was talking about the "larger" questions of the universe because of this line

At that time it was also hoped that a clarification
of humanity's basic mysteries -- the origin of the Library
and of time -- might be found

Natalie wrote: "Based on this conversation, I'm starting to agree that it would be fun to read more Borges with the group."

True! I would love to read more Borges too :)

I love this story so much. I share it with my students along with Book of Sand. Did you know this story has its own website? Someone created it as a project but they weren’t able to get very far with it. It’s still neat what’s there now! If you search for the title with .info at the end you’ll be able to see some people’s ideas on how the library looked!

J_BlueFlower wrote: "Sneha wrote: And in all, nobody really knows what the correct answer is. But each book has meaning. ....."

There are ways of testing for correctness. You can test with experiments. Maybe a math ex..."

Ahh with the math books now we're entering Douglas Adams territory. The answer to Life the Universe and Everything is that we've been getting the math wrong all along. LOL